My idea is simply generalising the idea to science software maintained
(more or less according to the policy) outside Debian. As outside
maintainers are most often not as much structured as Ubuntu is, I
believe it would be nice to provide (on Alioth) some intermediate
caring (and hopefully friendly) place for the sources of the packages
adopted by a `debian-science team' like what is done, for example, by
the OCaml maintainers¹. Such a place would also be nice for
integrating into Debian and sponsoring packagers of science software
willing to become Debian maintainers (it is the current OCaml
maintainers practice, and of many others similar teams I suppose).

*IF* there is the man power for this project, it sounds great.
(If not seeking for single software packages as targets and just
package them instead of thinking how we could support "all" sounds
more effective to me.)

Well, I just subscribed to debian-med. ;-) Though I will not be of
any help on the sponsoring side, not being a Debian maintainer
myself.

By just asking the inofficial packagers in private and ask them for
the reasons why the package is outside. In most cases they were happy
to move their packages to Debian and mostly these people entered the
NM queue. The hardes case is if a DD keeps his package outside and
does not respond (Emboss). Once I finished GNUmed packaging it will
be my next target. The way is to move this stuff to alioth
(http://alioth.debian.org/projects/pkg-emboss/ just created) and
steal (well is it really stealing, if somebody puts free software
on a web page and does not respond to questions?) his stuff to make
official packages.

One question is whether we have Debian developers interested in
supporting the idea just described (as there are in the utnubu team).

This question can be answered only ba the time.
If your intention is to get inofficial packages inside Debian, my
personall approach would be the following: Try to convince the packagers
at least to use mentors.debian.net. Then try to *tag* these packages
with "scientific:physics", "scientific:chemestry", ... and set up a
web page which evaluates thes tags. This might be the less work for a
in principle reasonable task which would need a larger amount of
manpower.
Kind regards
Andreas.
--
http://fam-tille.de